Chapter 39: Why Aren't You Replying? Is It Because I Didn't Send Anything?
"Welcome, welcome! A warm welcome to Leon, Stelle, and Caelus to the Astral Express family!" Himeko's message popped up on the holographic group chat, accompanied by a digital shower of confetti.
Welt followed suit a second later. "Welcome, everyone. I look forward to journeying alongside you."
Dan Heng kept it characteristically brief. "Welcome."
"Welcome, new passengers!" Pom-Pom's text bubble appeared, complete with an exclamation mark. "You must follow the Astral Express rules, pom!"
Stelle replied instantly. "I'm so happy to be a member of the Astral Express Crew~"
Caelus chimed in right after. "+1, please take care of us!"
Leon grinned, tapping his screen. "Thanks for the welcome~" He followed it up by casually dropping a sticker into the chat: a chibi Pom-Pom giving an enthusiastic thumbs-up, the round Conductor bouncing with endless vitality in the looped animation.
Almost immediately, the chat exploded.
"You! Passenger!" Pom-Pom typed furiously. "Please do not use the Conductor's image for stickers as you please, pom! (╬Ò﹏Ó)"
Leon's fingers danced over the glass. "Got it~" He hit send on another sticker. This time, it was an aggrieved, teary-eyed chibi Pom-Pom squatting miserably in a dark corner.
"You... you! (╬￣dish￣)"
A burst of giggles echoed down the corridor outside. March 7th's message popped up. "Hahaha, Leon, where did you get these stickers? They're so funny, send more to me!"
"Here you go~" Leon replied, attaching a sticker of a chibi March 7th puffing her chest out with an incredibly smug, proud expression.
March 7th: "..."
She looked up from her phone, shooting Leon a glare that was equal parts amused and annoyed. "I asked you to send Pom-Pom's stickers. Why did you send mine?"
A sudden realization hit her. She remembered the bizarre collection of images he had flashed at her when they first met. Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. Just how much of her 'dark history' did this guy have hoarded in his digital vault?
"Don't worry, there's enough for everyone. Enough to go around~" Leon chuckled, waving his phone lazily in the air.
Back in the parlor car, Himeko took a light sip of her freshly brewed coffee. A warm smile spread across her lips as she watched the animated chibi Pom-Pom and March 7th bouncing across her screen. "They really are quite cute~" she typed.
A second later, her phone buzzed. Leon had sent a new sticker. It was a chibi version of Himeko herself, elegantly raising a coffee cup, but with a faint, tipsy-like flush painted across her cheeks.
"Wow!" Stelle typed rapidly. "This sticker of Auntie Himeko is way too cute!"
Himeko gave a light, delicate cough. A faint blush crept up her neck, mirroring the sticker. Despite the slight embarrassment, her thumb betrayed her, quickly pressing 'Save Image' on the adorable, soft-looking caricature.
"A full collection. I have everything~" Leon typed, dropping a sticker of a chibi Stelle in a raccoon suit, aggressively eating a slice of melon.
"You even have mine!" Stelle replied. "What about Caelus, Dan Heng, and Uncle Yang?"
Dan Heng: "..."
Welt: "..."
Leon did not hold back. His thumb flew across the screen, unleashing a devastating nine-grid barrage of custom stickers.
There was Caelus with a blissfully dazed expression as he popped the lid off a Belobog trash can. Dan Heng sporting a look of utter helplessness with a digital loading circle spinning infinitely above his head. Welt pushing up his glasses while a miniature, cool-looking black hole materialized behind him. Every single one had been perfectly captured and rendered into an adorable, looping chibi animation.
"Wow! Where on earth did you get these?" March 7th laughed out loud, her fingers flying as she saved every single image to her local drive. "Everyone looks so cute!"
Watching the colorful stickers scroll endlessly across the group chat, a warm feeling settled in her chest. Life on the Astral Express was definitely going to become a lot more lively from now on.
After a bit more playful banter and laughter, the group said their goodbyes to March 7th for the evening.
Stelle and Caelus practically skipped back to the passenger cabin's storage room, their eyes shining with enthusiasm. They immediately began dragging partitions across the floor, mapping out the basic layout to divide the large space into two separate rooms. They chattered excitedly, already envisioning how to decorate their own little personal sanctuaries.
Leon strolled back to his own designated room. The door hissed shut behind him, cutting off the ambient hum of the Express. He threw himself onto the plush bed, pulled out his phone, and opened a private chat with Silver Wolf.
Leon: "Why aren't you replying to my messages? Is it because I didn't send any?"
He attached a sticker of a furious, table-flipping chibi Silver Wolf.
Lightyears away, Silver Wolf was in the middle of a high-stakes, sweat-inducing boss raid. Her fingers flew across her customized holographic keyboard in a blur. Her phone buzzed. She spared a fraction of a second to glance at the notification, her eyes locking onto the sticker of her own angry face.
She blinked. Her brain stalled for a microsecond. What kind of twisted, backwards logic was that? If you didn't send a message, what exactly was I supposed to reply to!
But the moment she registered the sender's name, she rolled her eyes. Of course. It was him.
Silver Wolf: "...I'm gaming. Talk to you later."
Leon: "Gaming? What game? Count me in."
He sat up, his interest piqued. He was brimming with curiosity about the digital entertainment in this universe. After all, the technology here was leagues ahead of his previous life. The gaming experience had to be absolutely mind-blowing.
Silver Wolf: "You want to play too? Sure..."
She paused her raid. A wicked, cunning plan began to form in her mind. She quickly generated an invite link to an ultra-hardcore, competitive fighting game and sent it over. She fully intended to 'educate' this guy. He always loved to tease her, always acted so smug.
Thinking back to the sheer embarrassment of him effortlessly hacking into her phone during their last encounter, a dangerous smirk played on the corners of her lips. It was time to avenge her past humiliation. She was going to crush him in her domain.
"You guy, have you really never played this game before? Or are you using hacks?"
"This is impossible!"
Silver Wolf stared at her monitor, utterly dumbfounded.
Dozens of minutes had passed, and the universe's greatest hacker was beginning to seriously question the meaning of her existence.
In the first round, she had won with her eyes closed. It felt exactly like beating up a tutorial bot.
In the second round, she noticed Leon's mechanics improving at a terrifying, lightning-fast speed. Still, it wasn't a big deal. She secured the win without breaking a sweat.
By the third round, the atmosphere shifted. Silver Wolf found herself leaning forward, her eyes glued to the screen, her fingers cramping as she executed frame-perfect parries. She was sweating buckets, eventually clinching a narrow victory by a razor-thin margin.
In the fourth round... she lost.
She lost completely. It was an absolute, undisputed slaughter. She didn't even get a single opening to fight back. Her character was juggled from one side of the screen to the other until the health bar evaporated.
"Hacking? If 'not turning it off' means I'm hacking, then I've never turned it off." Leon's voice drifted lazily through the voice chat, dripping with amusement. "What's wrong? Upset, little noob?"
He chuckled softly. Silver Wolf might be the invisible emperor of Punklorde, a legendary hacker worshipped by countless cyber-jockeys across the cosmos. But her actual competitive gaming mechanics? Just so-so. She had only managed to steal those three initial wins because he was still figuring out the control scheme. From this point forward, he could crush this little noob with one hand tied behind his back.
"Damn it, again!"
Hearing him call her a 'little noob' made a vein pop in Silver Wolf's forehead. She was furious... for exactly three seconds.
Then, the hacker instinct took over. If she couldn't win fair and square, she would just rewrite the rules.
As soon as the countdown for the fifth round began, Silver Wolf's eyes glowed faintly. She secretly activated Aether Editing, directly altering the game's code to give her character infinite frame advantage.
"This is no fun," Leon chuckled, instantly noticing the unnatural shift in the game's physics. He could practically see the digital strings she was pulling.
"What do you mean 'no fun'? I, Silver Wolf, am not cheating." She blinked innocently, though her voice carried a smug lilt. "And what's the problem anyway? Isn't Aether Editing my own natural ability? What's wrong with me using my own ability to play a video game?"
"Fair point. You're absolutely right."
Leon smiled. He tapped into his own conceptual authority, sending a tiny, invisible ripple of Elation through the digital connection. With a mere thought, he completely neutralized her Aether Editing, locking the game's code back to its original state.
"Then it wouldn't be too much for me to use a bit of my power either, right?" he asked smoothly.
"Wait, what did you do? My Aether Editing, why did it..." Silver Wolf mashed her keyboard, panic setting in as her character was instantly launched into the air by Leon's relentless combo.
"Damn... I give up."
She stared at the massive, glowing "DEFEAT" prompt plastered across her screen, curling her lip in deep frustration. She slumped back in her gaming chair.
However, this dejection lasted all of five seconds.
Suddenly, her eyes lit up. The frustration vanished, replaced by a bright, cheerful tone. "Come on, let's play ranked! Let's climb the ladder!"
An epiphany had just struck her. Why was she mad? Hadn't she just stumbled upon the ultimate gaming carry? With a monster like him on her team, they could dominate the leaderboards. There was nothing to be sad about; she should be celebrating!
"By the way," Leon asked casually, his fingers still lazily controlling his character in the post-match lobby. "Does Elio have any arrangements for the subsequent script? Do you guys plan to interfere with things over in Belobog?"
He leaned back against his pillows. Thinking about it now, the fact that Stelle and Caelus had been awakened at the exact same time must have thrown a massive wrench into Elio's grand prophecies. The impact on the script had to be immense. He was genuinely curious about how the 'Destiny's Slave' was handling the headache.
"No... wait, that's not right!" Silver Wolf's voice spiked with sudden realization. "How do you know about Belobog? Don't tell me Kafka already told you?"
She paused, the sound of a popping bubblegum echoing through the mic. "Originally, Belobog wasn't in our plans. But just to be safe, we're still going to make a trip there."
She sighed dramatically. "Speaking of which, this is mainly because of you... otherwise, I wouldn't have had to make this trip to that frozen rock at all."
"Oh? So you and Kafka are both heading to Belobog?"
"No, it's not me and Kafka. It's me and Firefly," Silver Wolf corrected him, the rapid clatter of her keyboard resuming. "After all, Firefly hasn't officially met you yet. It's a good chance for her to get to know you."
A light, mischievous chuckle escaped her lips, her tone suddenly brimming with anticipation. "Actually, Firefly is still completely in the dark about everything... I'm really curious to see her reaction when she finds out she's been 'sold' to you by Elio."
The rhythmic tapping of Silver Wolf's mechanical keyboard blended with her wicked giggles, as if the hacker could already vividly picture the highly amusing, chaotic scene that was about to unfold.
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